there is a garden in your chest needing watered, swan
by bobbingformangos
Summary: Regina smiles like she has flowers growing in her heart and Emma would really like to reach into her chest, pull out her heart, just to admire the beauty of it all. She watches from a distance and despite falling, falling, and falling into the dark waters of the ocean herself, she feels light and hope when she sees her smile.


**raw, unedited. **

* * *

She smiles like she has flowers growing in her heart and Emma would really like to reach into her chest, pull out her heart, just to admire the beauty of it all. She watches from a distance and despite falling, falling, and falling into the dark waters of the ocean herself, she feels light and hope when she sees her smile. She grows purple cornflowers and white lilies and herbs that you put into teas that make you happy in her smiles and Emma would drink it up all day if it was for her.

It's not for her, though.

Regina's not for her.

And Emma kicks herself for thinking in terms of how she wishes that Regina was "hers" because Regina wasn't a possession but a woman who could make a perfect partner. She was independent and loving and supportive and fucking hell, her heart grew flowers.

Instead, Emma sips on her hot chocolate and cinnamon and watches from the table by the window as her son and Regina laugh at a story that the forest man is saying and Emma simply can't picture it. She can't picture Regina haven't children with him or marrying him or getting lost in his eyes despite her getting lost in his story and it just sit well in her stomach.

* * *

It starts to rain the more Emma realizes that she's in love with Regina. It must have happened slowly, unnoticed, sliding under her door in the middle of the night and into her heart right before dawn, because Emma wasn't aware of these feelings.

Emma was quite aware of how she felt. She stuffed it down eventually, but Emma was pretty damn aware. And these feelings? This love? Yeah, it wasn't something that she realized.

The rain starts as a drizzle one morning when she noticed that she had been caught off guard, when it seeped into her room. Then the rain becomes constant as she remembers tiny moments with the former queen that planted the seeds under her skin over the years. Invitations for a drink, the love of their child, their magic combining over and over again - and it's then that Emma realizes that Regina had shared her heart, had planted a garden in Emma's broken heart and nurtured it without even realizing and now, now it was overgrown with wildflowers and herbs and it was desperate lately to be watered.

But her smiles are for someone else and not for Emma and so it rains, rains, rains.

* * *

It a month of raining before people realize that something is off - completely off - that it would rain the entire month of July and into August.

There are small floods and gardens are ruined and people are depressed but her smiles for him grow and grow and grow.

* * *

The garden in her chest thirsts, desperate to be watered. So, it rains harder.

* * *

"I can't control it," Emma says the moment that Regina opens the door. Her lips are downturned, face worried, and her hair sticking to her face. Behind her a storm rages on and the rain is coming down harder and there is lightening lighting up the night sky.

Regina rubs sleep from her eyes and wraps her robe tighter around her torso and her hair is sticking to her forehead because its August and rainy and the humidity is ungodly.

There have been talk about witchcraft causing the weather but no matter what Regina did, it didn't get better, and she was irritable and hot and smiling less often because fucking hell, who could smile when their face is sticky?

So she frowns at Emma because their son is asleep upstairs and safe and she doesn't know why else the blonde would be here on her doorstep at one in the mourning. Regina furrows her eyebrows and keeps her bare feet inside the door because the rain is getting worse and the wind is picking up and her porch is soaked, nearly as much as the blonde in front of her.

"What can't you control, Emma?" Regina asks, rubbing at her eyes again.

Emma's eyes widen and her arm flies back behind her, "That! I can't control it Regina!"

And Emma knows that finally coming to Regina meant that she finally had to fess up to what was happening inside the wilted garden that was her heart but this was out of her control and she needed help and there was no way in hell she would ask for the help of Gold or Blue, because, in all her years dealing with shady people, there was no two people more sketchy than those two.

And, well, maybe Emma was tired holding all of this inside. Maybe she was tired hiding her feeling. And maybe she was so fucking tired that she didn't care how she was tilting people's world's off their axis. Emma had so much shit going on inside her head, this tiny piece of it was begging, fucking begging, to be released.

Regina didn't understand, not at first, and nearly shut the door on the blonde before she realized that Emma was the cause of the rain. "Why?" slipped out of her lips all too quickly.

And Emma answered even quicker, "Because of you."

* * *

Emma's voice was broken and slightly hallow and it was that reason that Regina didn't flip out at being accused of being the cause of the storms and the rain and things slowly dying because too much water drowned people and plants and things.

She slowly brought the blonde into the house, so very quietly so that she wouldn't disturb their son or the little boy cuddled with his father in her guest room (because Regina wasn't ready to share her bed, not yet, not when it didn't feel right).

They tiptoed out of the foyer, Emma's hand in Regina's and she would be sighing at this contact, enjoying it and savoring it but instead her face was marred with worry and her heart was beating way too much and despite water being everywhere, she felt so dry inside. Regina lead her past the study and formal living room and dining room to the cove in the back right of the house, a small but cozy family room.

Regina shut the door before turning to frown at the blonde, wet and wilted, before shaking her head and lifting her fingers and drying to blonde off with a burst of magic. "Seriously, Emma, you would think that by this time you would wear a rain jacket or bring an umbrella."

Emma looked sheepish and sighed and immediately found her way to the couch, siting and cuddling into the back as she brought her legs up.

Regina watched the blonde fold into herself with a frown. This wasn't the brash Emma that she knew, the bold Emma who was rough around the edges and strong like yarrow and peppermint and bark.

Instead this was a girl that she could only guess that was similar to a girl who gave up her kid for his best chance, who was always overlooked in group home, and who never truly stood a chance in this world. She looked tired and nervous and Regina found herself coming to sit down on the couch next to her, reaching out a hand to touch the blonde's bare foot.

The lightening stopped outside, unnoticed.

"Tell me why you think that this is your fault," Regina asked softly in the dark room. "And why you think it's because of me."

And Emma sighed, her fingers playing with each other as she bit the inside of her bottom lip. She looked so small, so wilted and damaged and everything that she would never want anyone to think of her.

Regina noticed.

She also noticed how Emma never put on a mask around her. Just like the blonde knew her, Regina was realizing that she knew Emma pretty well too.

It felt like she was breathing in water when she tried to talk. She unentangled her fingers and brought a finger up to tap against her heart, "Its too dry in there."

It was riddle that Regina knew she should solve but it was odd, Emma speaking in riddles, and she scrunched up her face and Emma continued, "And so it rains because it's too dry in there."

Magic is emotion.

And Emma's emotion is causing this.

Regina was finally catching on. But how was it…

"I didn't mean for it to happen," Emma whispers and there is a soft sob that hits Regina's ears in a way that causes her own heart to hurt. And there are tears on Emma's cheeks and she is choking out before she could control the tumbling words, "I didn't mean to fall in love with you."

And Regina's chest hurts. It hurst and stings and her heart is contracting in a way that she never felt before, twisting and flipping and jumping to her stomach and then her throat, unable to stay within it's home behind her ribs.

And there is goes, her world off its axis.

* * *

Emma falls asleep sometime after her sobs turn to chokes and she's gasping for air and Regina moved forward to pull her into her arms and hold her and sooth her and neither woman expected the action.

It kind of just happened.

Just like how the rain just kind of stopped and the sky just cleared and no more thunder just didn't boom in the sky.

Emma laid halfway in Regina's lap, a leg strung over Regina's side and her chest pressed into Regina's chest and her face buried into the part where neck and shoulder met. Regina's hand caressed her hair and her cheek nuzzled against Emma's golden curls and they were so intertwined and it felt so right and the rain had ended.

It was confusing, the way her heart tumbled in her chest and then settled, beating against her chest so hard that it pressed against Emma's and Regina thought of fairy tales and soul mates and how her's was asleep with his son upstairs while she held a woman who was in love with her and when did her chest sting and yearn and become so desperate to hold tight to Emma Swan?

* * *

Emma's wrapped in a quilt that used to be her's as a young girl. Its purple with lavender flower designs sewed in and it was the only thing that her mother made her that Regina holds tight. The August sun starts to rise when Henry wakes up and he's helping her quietly make breakfast when Robin comes down the steps with Roland in her arms.

Her smile is tight, not reaching her eyes or growing flowers in her heart when she asks him for space. And her lungs are hurting when he nods his head without asking a question and tells her that him and his boy will be in the woods and that she should take her time to figure out whatever she needs. And she noticed that Robin had settled in her lungs because they are squeezing in pain when he walks out the door and her heart is still pumping fast, tumbling, needing to go check on Emma who's asleep on the couch and who spent most the night asleep in her lap and against her.

And Regina, well, Regina is confused at the garden in her chest that has been growing there for a long, long time, planted slowly by the blonde in the next room.

"It's finally sunny out, Mom," Henry comments as he's scrambling eggs, a huge smile on his face.

And, even in her confusion, Regina notices the sun and understand Emma's tapping of her finger on her own chest and now that they have watered their gardens they now need sun, and maybe, well, maybe Regina can figure it out sooner rather than later so that can happen.


End file.
